"Commentary from P.M. Carpenter"

January 22, 2013

The GOP's Inaugural Address II, as seen on Fox

If you missed Fox News' primetime coverage of President Obama's inauguration, then you missed a theatre of the absurd that was perhaps peerless. The NY Times observed editorially that President Obama spoke "only obliquely of the persistent gridlock in Congress, where he will face right-wing Republicans whose bleak agenda would weaken civil rights, shred the social safety net and block important programs that could help put millions of jobless Americans back to work," but that was OK, because Fox had it covered--the bleakness, that is.

I rarely watch what Ailes, however it seemed acutely advisable last night, given that the nation awaits the Grand Old Party's incubating permutations of grimly odd pettiness. So it was with plucky resolve that, interspersed with my evening's immensely apt reading--Foucault's Madness and Civilization--I suffered through huge, hallucinatory chunks of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity.

Their division of labor was intriguing. While O'Reilly punctuated again and again the eschatology of debt, about which, according to the host, Obama is altogether oblivious--as was the host to the ideological history of the debt's true Lords of Creation--Hannity convulsed sentimentally over national joblessness, about which Obama, one gathered, is just as oblivious. Hannity gravely interviewed two House Republicans about the jobs crisis. They too were grave in agreeing with Sean that we have a grave crisis. We need more jobs. No recovery recommendations, however, were forthcoming.

Anyway so there we have it--a peek preview into how the pseudoconservative crime bosses intend to go after Obama for the next couple years. Wailing about the debt that they racked up and decrying a glacial reemployment pace of their own insistent making are of course nothing new; yet I detected not one dram of a more happily warring Republicanism, which is the fraudulent word on the streets.

Comments

The GOP's Inaugural Address II, as seen on Fox

If you missed Fox News' primetime coverage of President Obama's inauguration, then you missed a theatre of the absurd that was perhaps peerless. The NY Times observed editorially that President Obama spoke "only obliquely of the persistent gridlock in Congress, where he will face right-wing Republicans whose bleak agenda would weaken civil rights, shred the social safety net and block important programs that could help put millions of jobless Americans back to work," but that was OK, because Fox had it covered--the bleakness, that is.

I rarely watch what Ailes, however it seemed acutely advisable last night, given that the nation awaits the Grand Old Party's incubating permutations of grimly odd pettiness. So it was with plucky resolve that, interspersed with my evening's immensely apt reading--Foucault's Madness and Civilization--I suffered through huge, hallucinatory chunks of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity.

Their division of labor was intriguing. While O'Reilly punctuated again and again the eschatology of debt, about which, according to the host, Obama is altogether oblivious--as was the host to the ideological history of the debt's true Lords of Creation--Hannity convulsed sentimentally over national joblessness, about which Obama, one gathered, is just as oblivious. Hannity gravely interviewed two House Republicans about the jobs crisis. They too were grave in agreeing with Sean that we have a grave crisis. We need more jobs. No recovery recommendations, however, were forthcoming.

Anyway so there we have it--a peek preview into how the pseudoconservative crime bosses intend to go after Obama for the next couple years. Wailing about the debt that they racked up and decrying a glacial reemployment pace of their own insistent making are of course nothing new; yet I detected not one dram of a more happily warring Republicanism, which is the fraudulent word on the streets.